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President Barack
Obama’s scant involvement with the Fiscal Cliff negotiations has been limited to
his rigid
insistence that the tax rate
on the nation’s job creators be raised from 35% to
39.6%.
Tax reform –
as a general principle and a way to raise revenue – is a presidential
non-starter.
Now. Last year,
the president said this:
“What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in
additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes — tax
rates — but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating
some deductions and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered
rates generally while broadening the base.”
Funny, that’s what
House Speaker John Boehner just
proposed. $800 billion over
ten years in additional coin for the realm. By loophole-eliminating,
code-simplifying – and thus job creating – tax reform. Not via job-killing tax
rate increases.
And the
President’s tax hikes will kill jobs – 710,000 of
them. While only raising
the same $800 billion over the next decade.
Do not
misunderstand – this is not a defense of Speaker Boehner’s revenue raise. The
Feds don’t have a revenue problem – they have a spending
one.
2007
Federal Budget: $2.73 trillion.
Deficit: $161 billion.
Note: This was the last all Republican
budget – the House, Senate and White House were at the time all run by the
Rs.
2012
Federal Budget: $3.796 trillion.
Deficit: $1.327 trillion.
If we simply
returned to 2007 levels of spending, our trillion-plus dollar annual budget
deficits would all but vanish.
The fact
remains – we desperately need tax reform. The president used to agree. The
question is – what tax code status quo is the president trying to
protect?
President
Obama and his Democrats in fact love our arcane, bizarre, totally
anti-Reality tens-of-thousands-of-pages tax code. (And our millions-of-pages of
laws. And our millions-of-pages regulatory
code.)
The harder
it is for businesses to do business (and citizens to conduct their lives) – the
better they like it. And the cryptic, dense codified inanity creates tons of
room for them to pick their preferred private sector losers at the expense of
its winners – and slosh them hundreds of billions of Taxpayer dollars while
they’re at it.
This isn’t Crony
Capitalism – this is Crony
Socialism.
To choose
but one example, let us look at “energy” Crony
Socialism.
Renewable energy and energy efficiency
accounted for $16 billion of the federal support, according to the Congressional
Budget Office, while the fossil-fuel industry received $2.5 billion in tax
breaks….
CBO said the $24 billion total is a small
fraction of the hundreds of billions of the government’s various annual
subsidies, which take the form of both grants and tax
breaks.
[Excerpt emphasis ours.]
To one
abysmal failure after another.
And the 2009 $787
billion “Stimulus” bill contained about $60 billion in additional “green”
“energy” cash – ostensibly for “green” gigs. But
as Newsweek then reported (emphasis again ours):
The working definition (of “green job”)
paints a broad stroke: a job that’s good for the economy while
simultaneously healing the earth. But that leaves lots open to interpretation –
natural gas is technically a cleaner fuel than crude oil, but it’s still
unsustainable.
Making it difficult, if not impossible, to
measure whether eco-based jobs are being created and whether, as the
administration has claimed, they’re the saviors of a sagging
economy….
In large part, the very idea behind a
green job ensures there will never be a full definition….
Well it
appears the Obama Administration eventually arrived at a
delineation.
This “green”
“energy” government-money “investment” experiment has clearly been a
multi-decade (ethanol,
anyone?), trillions-of-dollars uber-failure.
Why would
President Obama insist on job-killing, tiny-money-raising tax rate increases –
while protecting such a gi-normous Taxpayer
debacle?
Oh
yeah.
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